Filed under: Portable Audio

Ok Fair Use advocates, listen up. EMI senior VP Lauren Berkowitz has just given her initial sales report following their much ballyhooed DRM-free launch on iTunes Plus last month. The results? Well, “good” is the word she used to summarize sales. During the first week of availability, sales of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon were up 350 percent. Even now, after all the initial excitement, sales remain 272 percent higher. To a lesser degree, other EMI artists are also riding the DRM-free, download bump; even while their respective CD sales have tailed off. For example, downloads for Norah Jones’ Come Away with Me are up some 24 percent while CD sales have dropped 33 percent. Still, the DRM-free tracks were launched only three weeks ago which is far too early for any kind of proper trend analysis. We also don’t have any correlating data to demonstrate an increase (or decrease) in piracy — something the record labels will likely weigh in equal importance. Things do look promising though, eh?

[Via Ars Technica]

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

Filed under: Misc. Gadgets

It looks like the streets of London will soon be getting an extra dash of advertising courtesy of BT, which has begun the roll-out of some fresh new payphones, marking the first redesign the company’s done in more than 20 years. Designed in partnership with advertising firm JCDecaux, the so-called Street Talk 6 kiosks boast illuminated scrolling advertisements on the rear and no walls or doors, with only a small plastic hood provided to protect the cellphone-less among you from the elements. Apparently, the payphone’s cost BT about £2,000 (or close to $4,000) apiece, although we somehow doubt they’ll have much trouble making that back a few times over. Look for the first of the new payphones to hit the Richmond and Ealing boroughs of London this week, with the roll-out presumably set to slowly expand throughout the rest of the U.K. shortly thereafter.

[Via Channel 4]

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

Filed under: Cellphones, Digital Cameras, Displays, Gaming, HDTV, Home Entertainment, Laptops, Portable Audio, Portable Video

Howard Stringer — Sony Corp’s CEO and man with the plan — just exited stage-left from Sony’s annual shareholder meeting in Tokyo. To say that the 6,000 attendees were skeptical of said plan would be an understatement given a year of fiscal losses, job cuts, PS3 under-performance (with an eventual Kutaragi dismissal), and an embarrassing and dangerous recall of some 10 million batteries among other missteps. Still, Howard stood strong, assuring investors that Sony has made the swtich from “recovery to profitable growth” and will be a “dominant company” in the digital age. So what’s the plan?

Continue reading Sony’s back: shifting from “recovery to profitable growth” — 380 new PS3 games

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

Filed under: Digital Cameras

We’re beginning to wonder if someone isn’t adding a little something to the water over in England, as a recent heist of Sigma Imaging‘s UK offices makes the country home to the second high-stakes consumer electronics robbery this month. The crooks, which were affectionately dubbed a “professional gang,” reportedly broke into the offices and warehouse of Sigma UK in order to lift “a large quantity” of wares. So much so, in fact, that Sigma has warned that the incident could “temporarily disrupt supply to customers,” but it failed to mention exactly what was stolen. Notably, the culprits must have momentarily forgotten that they were in the surveillance capital of the world, and now police are breaking down CCTV footage in order to garner more details.

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

Filed under: Gaming

If you couldn’t quite make it to the last Wii marriage counseling session, there’s still good news coming from Georgia Tech. Thanks to a group of engineering minds at the university, a new augmented reality game (dubbed AR Facade) is placing you in the center of a marital spat with nearly limitless options. The program apparently runs on a back-worn laptop and utilizes an oh-so-tacky head mountable display, and developers suggest that being placed in the midst of an “interactive drama” allows you to choose sides, attempt to mediate, and basically “define your own way to win” as you try to talk some sense into the flustered couple. Interestingly, there’s even talk of bringing such games “onto mobile phones” and into the workplace, but it looks like they’ve got a bit of hardware trimming to do first.

[Via The Raw Feed]

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!